PowerPoint Presentations about searching the MJP

"Steps for Searching," created by Celena Kusch at the University of South Carolina in Spartanburg, offers students a step-by-step guide for conducting full-text searches using the MJP's basic search engine.

Using the MJP's basic search engine

This engine allows searches of periodicals, biographies, books, essays, or images* in the MJP collection—or all of the above. Use the Limit to drop-down menu, on the right side of the search page, to restrict searches to one of these options. The other basic search functions are:

Keyword(s)—enter words or phrases you wish to locate

Using—select

And: to search for results that contain all of your keywords, in any order and any place in the field or text that you're searching

Or: to search for results that contain at least one of your keywords (this is the least restrictive Using option)

Phrase: to search for results that contain all of your keywords, exactly in the order that you’ve typed them (this is the most restrictive Using option)

Search in—select

Full text: to search for your keyword(s) in the digital text transcripts of materials in the MJP archive

Author/Editor/Artist: to search the digital catalogues of MJP materials for the person(s) responsible for some item

Title: to search the MJP digital catalogues for one or more words that appear in the title fields for some item

All Metadata Fields: to search for your keyword(s) in both the Author/Editor/Artist and the Title fields, as well as in the cataloguer's notes about an item

Using the MJP's advanced search engine for journals

Advanced searching is designed to allow focused searches confined to the MJP
collection of periodicals. There are two options:

You can conduct a Full Text Search*,
which looks for your search terms in the digital text transcripts we
have produced for every issue of every MJP journal—the many thousands
of words that make up the text of these magazines.

Or you can conduct a Metadata Search*,
which looks for your search terms in the digital catalogues we’ve
constructed when classifying the various items in the MJP journals.

With advanced searching, you can focus both full-text and metadata searches in the
following ways, which are not possible in basic searching of MJP
journals:

Multiple keyterm boxes—The
advanced search page gives you two keyword boxes (each with its own
And/Or/Phrase menu), which you can relate in three ways: AND, OR, and
NOT. This set-up allows you to search for complex combinations of
terms: e.g., to find all the full-text references to Well’s Tono-Bungay, you might enter "tono bungay" in box 1 with AND, "tono-bungay" with And in box 2, and then relate the two with OR.

The NOT option—This
gives you another tool not available in basic searching; by selecting
NOT, you can search the MJP database for materials that contain the
terms in the upper box but not those in the lower box. For instance, if you wanted to locate only the poetry published by Alice Corbin Henderson—apart from the other work she published as associate editor of Poetry Magazine—you could do an Author/Editor/Artist search for "Corbin" Not "Henderson," since she always dropped her married name from her poems.

Limit By Year—By
entering start and end dates in the two boxes, you can search
for only those journals published in the specified years. To limit your search to a single year, enter the same year in both boxes or simply leave the second box blank.

Limit By Journal—Choose
No Restriction to search all the MJP periodicals at once, or select the
title of any of the listed MJP journals to limit your search to that
one magazine.

Combining different metadata fields—By conducting an Author/Editor/Artist search
with one keyword box and a Title search with the other, you can zero in on the particular item
you’re looking for.

Limit By Genre*—This
feature allows you to restrict your search to one of the genres we’ve
used to classify various items in the MJP periodicals: Articles, Drama, Fiction, Graphics*, Letters*, or Poetry.

Note: in the advanced metadata search field, you can use the year, journal, and genre limiting menus to call up exhaustive lists of items from MJP journals (e.g., all poems that appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1913 and 1914) if you type an asterisk (*) in the "Keywords" search box, select Title in the "Search in" box, and then enter your search limits in any of the three "Limit By" menus at the bottom.

Tips on entering keywords

There is no need to put quotation marks or brackets around the terms you want to search for.

If you enter two or more terms, simply leave a space between them—there is no need for punctuation.

The search engine cannot process certain kinds of punctuation (like exclamation
marks, questions marks, and colons), so you should mostly avoid them when
searching, though adding a comma between the author’s last name and
first name is standard procedure when doing an author search.

Diacritical marks: If the name or word you are searching for includes
an accent or diacritical mark (like an umlaut), you need to include
that mark in your search term for the search engine to recognize it: e.g., a search for images by Léger will identify results in the MJP archive
but a search for Leger will not. Since you cannot type in accents in the
Keyword box, the best solution is to copy the word with the accent from
a word processor page and paste it into the search box. We also recommend searching both with and without accents, using OR.

Wildcard searching: As noted on the basic search page, you can use wildcards
in any of your searches by replacing letters from a search term with an
asterisk, which will locate all words with the same trunk: e.g.,
Suffrag* will locate suffrage, suffragist, and suffragette, but the
asterisk only works at the end of words, not the beginning.

For Author/Editor/Artist searches, you will get best
results by first entering the person’s last name, then the first name(s): e.g., Monroe, Harriet (using a comma) or Monroe Harriet (without a comma)—both work. The search engine will additionally recognize first-name / last-name formulations—e.g., Harriet Monroe—if you also select AND (though this will also produce hits for "Monroe Harriet," if such a person exists in the MJP database).

The search engine is, for the most part, not case sensitive, so you will get the same results when searching for: Monroe, Harriet; monroe, harriet; MONROE, HARRIET; MONROE, harriet; and even MOnroe, HArriet. But the engine will not recognize mOnroe, Harriet or Monroe, HarrieT.

Tips on searching for specific kinds of items

Advertisements: If you are interested in locating advertising for certain products—like "Studebaker" or "Sanatogen"—we recommend that you undertake a full-text search for these terms. We have taken pains to ensure that the correct spelling of the product name of each ad (at very least) appears in the text transcripts of the MJP journals. Unfortunately, we have not yet catalogued the individual ads that appear in these journals, so you cannot at this time use metadata searching to locate specific advertisements.

Book reviews:There is no single foolproof way to locate all book reviews (and other reviews) in the MJP journals, in part because these items are often not well marked in the magazines and are hard to classify accurately. However, if you use the advanced metadata search page and search for an author while selecting "Articles" as the Genre, you should get all of that author’s book reviews; and if you do a title search for the title and/or author of a book, you should get any reviews of that book. You can also combine the two: e.g., if you do an advanced metadata search for Pound as Author and Eliot as Title, you will locate Pound's book review of Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations. Finally, title searches that include the terms "Book Review" will locate many reviews, though not all of them.

Letters*: When we catalogue journal contents, we use the genre category of "letters" to refer to two things: contemporary correspondence by readers (like letters to the editor) published in a magazine, as well as the letters of famous people (like "General Grant's Letters to General Beale") that were written in the past but have since been collected and published in a magazine.

To locate either kind of letter, you might use the advanced search page to limit searches to the genre of "Letters" and then conduct a title search for specific topics addressed—like Russia, Trade Union, etc.

If you are looking for a specific letter-writer, you might conduct both author and title searches with the author's name, since the author may appear in the title of the piece: e.g., "Nietzche and Strindberg Letters," the "Letters of Junius."

Journals in the 1910 Collection: Among the journals that the MJP has digitized, there is a special group—which we call the 1910 Collection—that consists of sample issues of 24 different magazines that were published "on or around December 1910." Each of these journal issues has been catalogued and its text transcribed, so its contents can be located using the MJP search engine. However, unlike the other journals in the MJP archive, you cannot use the advanced search page to limit your searches to all 24 journals together or to any one of these journals individually. If you want to search for these magazines as a group, we recommend that you use the "Limit By Year" tool, in the advanced metadata search page, to restrict your search to the years 1910-1912—that will catch all of these journals (and a few others). To search just one of these magazines, you'll need to search its PDF document, available through the 1910 Collection gateway page.

Reading the search results display

At the top of every search results page, you will
be told the number of records your search has located. The first
ten of those results will appear on the page. If your search yields more
than ten hits, you can use the (Next) button at the top of the
page to scroll forward to the other results. On these subsequent results
pages, you will also find—at the top of the page, before the (Next) button—a
(Prev) button that you can use to scroll backwards through the
results. Over time, we hope to allow users to jump forward through the
search results, instead of having to scroll through them ten at a time.
In the meantime, if your search produces more results than you can conveniently
navigate, we recommend that you use the advanced search pages to undertake
a more focused search.

How search results are sorted: The results of any search conducted on the MJP search engine are sorted in the following way: first by type, then by title, then by date (year, month, day), then by creator.

Sorting by type: The MJP has classified its texts into five types: periodicals (or journals), biographies, books, essays, and images*. Every search you conduct on the MJP search pages will first display any hits for periodicals (which make up the bulk of the MJP database) and only then display the hits for the other (less numerous) secondary materials.

Sorting by title: If your search yields multiple hits for different journals, you’ll see that these records are sorted, alphabetically, by the title of the journal itself (excluding any initial article): e.g., Blast, [The] English Review, [The] New Age sort alphabetically by B, E, N. For the other four types of texts in the MJP archive, items are organized alphabetically by the title of each individual item.

Notes about what is displayed in the search results:

Page numbers: The page numbers that appear in the search result for an item always take the form of one or more page spans (e.g., 45-52 or 2-4, 6-8), even if the item runs for only a single page (e.g., 12-12), and these page numbers generally duplicate the pagination found in the magazine itself, which appear as well on the MJP's contents page for each issue and in the MJP's PDF version of the magazine. The page numbers displayed in the search results for the most part do not refer to the pagination that accompanies the MJP's page images and thumbnails; those page numbers are always a simple count of every page in an issue, extending from the magazine's front cover to the back. This means that to identify the location of an item in the page images using the page numbers from the search results, you may first have to open the PDF for that issue (for more about this, see the note on "Page Images" in the section below). When a page is left unnumbered in the original magazine, the MJP will assign a page number to it when it catalogues the issue, usually employing a capital letter beginning with "A." These page numbers also show up in search results, so the page number for the Contents page of Little Review 3.1 (for instance) appears online as A-A, and the page number of the Front Advertisements for that issue is B-B (whereas in the page images for this issue, the Contents page appears as page 1 and the front advertisements page as page 2). If there are more than 26 unnumbered pages in a magazine, the MJP will assign double letters to each new page: e.g., in Little Review 8.2, Francis Picabia's image "Force Comique" appears on page Y-Y (which corresponds to page 57 of the page images), while his next image in the magazine, "Chose admirable a voir," appears on page AA-AA (or page 59 of the page images). Please note that page notations that involve letters in the MJP's search results are likely part of the MJP's page notation system and are not part of the original magazine.

Locating the texts identified by the search results

For biographies, books, essays, and images* in the MJP archive, getting from the search record to the thing itself is simple: just click on the boldfaced title for an item, and you’ll be taken to it.

For journals, getting to a specific item is more complex. Unlike the secondary materials mentioned above, the individual items that show up in metadata searches of journals are not free-standing texts but instead remain embedded still within an issue of a journal. Thus, it’s that magazine issue, and not the item within it, that we’ve highlighted in the search record—and when you click on that link, you will be taken to the MJP’s gateway page for that issue, which contains a table of contents, along with links to three different ways to view the magazine (and the item you've searched for): as a PDF document, as a sequence of discrete page images, and as a set of thumbnails. Here are some suggestions for working with these materials:

The table of Contents gives you a quick overview of the contents of the issue, and thus will help you situate the item you’re looking for among the other items in the magazine. In particular, you can use the page number listed for your item in the search display to find its location in this contents list. (We should note, though, that some items catalogued in our database, including most incidental illustrations, will not show up in the MJP contents list—just as many different things that appear in any magazine will not be represented in the table of contents at the front.)

The PDF functions as a handy digital version of the magazine. If you're using a PC, the PDF may open directly in your browser window (so long as your computer is running a version of Acrobat Reader); and regardless of what kind of computer you’re using, the PDF of the entire magazine can be downloaded as a single file from the MJP website. Unlike the page images and thumbnails, the PDF provides a photograph of every page combined with an embedded digital transcript of the magazine, which allows its contents to be searched and its text copied (with the help of the Acrobat Select tool). You can also use the PDF to quickly locate your item, as we’ve numbered the pages (in the left-hand scroll bar) to correspond to the pagination in the original magazine. You can magnify any PDF page for closer viewing.

The Page Images option allows you to scroll through a sequence of high-quality, high-resolution jpg images of the magazine, one page at a time. Each page can also be magnified. If you need a high-quality reproduction of a page, or if you cannot make out something on the corresponding low-resolution PDF page, the page images are your best option. But these files are image only, with no text under them, which means that you can neither search them nor select a passage and paste it as text elsewhere, as you can with the PDF pages. Also, page images are numbered in their own sequence: they do not follow the numbering on the magazine pages. To locate a specific page image using the page number listed in the search results, you may want to open the PDF document, enter your page number in the rectangular box at the top of the Acrobat (or browser) window, and when you press enter, the page number for the corresponding page image will appear immediately to the right: e.g., 534 (26 of 204), where 534 is the original page number and 26 the number of the corresponding page image.

The Thumbnails are essentially an alternative way to view the page images: instead of appearing in sequence, they are reduced in size and grouped together as a collection or grid. This allows you to easily locate a particular image, and to literally see the magazine as a whole, all at once. If you click on any one thumbnail, you’ll be taken back to the page images, which you can magnify further, if you want a larger view. Since the thumbnails share the same pagination as the page images, you should use the instructions above to locate a thumbnail by its page number.

Glossary of key terms

All Metadata Fields: refers to both author and title information together, as well as the cataloguer's notes about an item (which may include, for instance, the sub-heads for a text or additional caption information about an image).

Full Text Search: refers to the searching of the TEI (text encoding initiative) transcripts that the MJP has created for materials in its collection, including all of its journals. Every MJP journal has been run through an OCR (optical character resolution) program, which converts graphic images into digital text. The resulting transcript is then corrected for accuracy and tagged with level-two TEI mark-up. It is this digital text that is searched when you conduct a full-text search of a journal; the smallest unit for such a search is an entire issue.

Genre: refers, in the advanced metadata search page, to one of the six categories that we have used to classify items in the MJP periodicals—articles, drama, fiction, graphics, letters, and poetry. The items described by these six genres remain embedded within specific journals, and should be distinguished from similar kinds of free-standing materials in the wider MJP archive, such as articles written on different topics or image files in our image database. You can search for these latter kinds of secondary texts by using the basic search engine and limiting your search to one of the following categories: biographies, books, essays, or images.

Graphics: refers, as a genre on the advanced search page, to illustrations and other visual texts that appear within a magazine, as opposed to free-standing image files in the MJP collection. To search for graphics, use the advanced metadata search engine and select "Graphics" as your limiting genre.

Images: refers to free-standing image files in the MJP collection, as opposed to "graphics" or illustrations that appear within a magazine. To search for images, use the basic search engine and limit your search to "Images."

Journals: refers, on the advanced search page, to all MJP periodicals or magazines, and is identical to the "Periodicals" listed in the "Limit to" feature on the basic search page.

Letters: refers, as a genre in the advanced search page, to individual letters that readers have sent to a magazine, as well as an author's collected correspondence (written previously) that a magazine has chosen to publish.

Metadata Search: refers to the searching of the METS (metadata encoding and transmission standards) records that the MJP has created for materials in its collection, including all of its journals. When we catalogue the contents of a magazine, we record the person(s) responsible for each item, its title information, genre, and page-span, along with some other data about it. Metadata searches search these records, rather than the magazine text transcripts.

Periodicals: refers, on the basic search page, to all MJP journals or magazines, and is identical to the "Journal: No Restriction" option available on the advanced search page.